I was first exposed to to computers at the age of 15, when my dad got me a Sharp computer. I can't remember the exact model number now, but it looked like a HP calculator on steroids. It had a single line LCD display, and 1 kilobyte of memory. It functioned a lot like the HP scientific calculator I currently had, except that it had a cassette tape interface. Every line of a program had to entered into the machine using a small QWERTY keypad. It was fairly good for what it was, in that it gave me an understanding on programming languages, and taught me the miseries of debugging a program. I used it in school for Add Maths, and it was extremely useful, until one day the Maths Master saw me using it, and asked me to show him some of the functions. After seeing a few of the capabilities of the computer, he took it away, and told me that everytime I went into his class, I was to surrender it to him for the duration of the class. In college, I reverted to using a Casio fx350. It was lighter and didn't consume batteries like a sailor drinking whiskey on shore leave. At this time, the computer to have was an Apple II. Or if you couldn't afford the real deal, a clone made by Pineapple computers with a mono screen was the way to go. If you were super rich, you'd get the CGA display, and twin 360kb FDDs. One trick we used to have, because the floppies were single sided, was to punch out a tab from the opposite side and flip the floppy over to double the storage space. We played Castle Wolfenstein ("Schweinhunde!") and Ultima and Zork. Mine came with an 80 column Epson printer. Black and white 9 pin dot matrix. Laser printers were newly invented, extremely expensive (US$7K in eighties dollars), and strictly the provenance of corporate offices. In university, I was exposed to mainframes and Unix for the first time. We were given accounts, and we had to enter our programs, work, whatever into data terminals. The sysadmins behaved, and were treated, like gods. We spent many nights in the Computer Lab building, crunching numbers, attempting hacks and eating copious amounts of pizza. Data was stored on tape drives, and came on giant reels. We also had a few hard drives, which came in casings the size of filing cabinets, and required a room all to themselves, because when they were running they made a noise reminiscent of 747s taking off. One particular evening, one of the admins managed to find a doorway into the mainframe of a very large corporation. I'm not revealing the name of the corporation, for legal reasons. To celebrate, the said admin started opening six packs, in direct contravention of campus regulations. The highlight of the evening came when the admin puked all over the server when he was dancing on top of it, naked. I have photos of this somewhere...